immanence

The following is a significantly revised version of an article I posted to the Indications blog (and etc) five and a half years ago. I was curious to see how much of it still holds (a lot, I think), so I’ve revisited it and expanded its proposed sort-of-canon, in the second part of what follows, into a list of 33 or so classics and quasi-classics of the environmental studies — and, at least through substantial overlap, environmental humanities — field(s). Comments welcome.

Is there an Environmental Studies canon?

An e-mail asking about an “environmental studies canon,” sent to the ASLE listserv in 2009 by veteran environmental writer John Lane, might have flared up into a full-throttle debate over the joys and pitfalls of disciplinary canonization, but quickly fizzled out, probably due to its coinciding with the end of summer and beginning of the fall semester. John’s proposed list, shared below, reflected the “mainstream” American environmental studies consensus fairly well, and the responses pointed both to its problems and to the breadth of unquestioned support some of its texts would get from those who teach in the field.

Lane’s initial suggestion of canonic readings leaned toward the traditionalist end of American environmental studies (henceforth, “ES”). Here it is… (Quiz question: what do almost all of the following have in common?)

1. Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic” from Sand County Almanac
2. Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”
3. Preface to Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
4. Henry Thoreau’s “Walking”
5. First chapter of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.
6. Wallace Stegner’s “Wilderness Letter”
7. “Seeing” by Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
8. Robinson Jeffers’ “Hurt Hawk”
9. Something from E.O. Wilson [?]
10. Barry Lopez’s “Children in the Woods”

The first criticism that arose within minutes of its posting was that this list represented a bunch of white males, with two token white females, and that all were American (i.e., USan, pronounced “you-essan”). Suggested additions and replacements to that list included Robert Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie, Deming and Savoy’s Colors of Nature, Cherrie Moraga’s Heroes and Saints, Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp-Dwellers, Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive, Karl Polanyi’s historical treatise The Great Transformation, Ursula LeGuin’s SF novel The Dispossessed, and Neil Evernden’s ecophilosophical The Natural Alien.

To the first list, based on other list members’ responses and suggestions, Lane eventually added a series of other readings, which included Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, Michael Soule’s and Daniel Press’s provocative 1998 Conservation Biology article “What Is Environmental Studies?” (but I would suggest you read Maniates’ and Whissel’s reply to that as well), David Orr’s Earth in Mind, Aldo Leopold’s “Thinking like a mountain”, E.O. Wilson’s “Biophilia and the conservation ethic” and Stephen Kellert’s “The biological basis for human values of nature” (both from Wilson/Kellert’s collection The Biophilia Hypothesis), Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, Paul Dayton’s & Enric Sala’s “Natural history: the sense of wonder, creativity, and progress in ecology“, Wendell Berry’s “In distrust of movements” and “The idea of a local economy,” Frances Moore Lappé and Paul Martin Du Bois’s “Democracy’s lifeblood”, The Brundtland Commission’s “On Population, Environment, and Development”, and Michael Pollan’s “Naturally”, “Power steer”, and “When a crop becomes king” (three essays that presaged The Omnivore’s Dilemma). To soften the blow of a still overwhelmingly white, male, and essayistic list, he added Stephen White’s translation of Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s Seven Trees Against the Dying Light, Helena Maria Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus , Luis Sepúlveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, and cartoonist Gary Larson’s There’s a Hair in My Dirt.

Any such attempted canonization inevitably raises as many questions as it answers. The field has had a handful of anthologies that have already tried to create such a canon (such is the nature of anthologies): Glenn Adelson et al’s Environment mega-tome, Nelissen, van Straaten & Kliners’ Classics in Environmental Studies, and Olszewski & Schiavo’s now out-of-print Readings in Environmental Studies (both of the latter could use updating), as well as loosely related anthologies like American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (McKibben, ed., 2008), The Palgrave Environmental Reader (Payne & Newman, eds., 2005), and various British and other analogues. Related fields like “green studies” (see Laurence Coupe’s collection The Green Studies Reader), environmental humanities, ecocriticism, et al. have all featured somewhat more specific anthologies.

But there are so many directions one could go with environmental studies canonization — e.g., towards literature and poetry (Whitman, Wordsworth, Callenbach’s Ecotopia, Frank Herbert’s Dune); literary and cultural history (Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory); popular science (Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, Lovelock’s Gaia, Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature, Humberto Maturana’s and Francesco Varela’s The Tree of Knowledge); environmental history (Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism, Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism); ecophilosophy (Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Murray Bookchin’s Ecology of Freedom — which is less philosophy than all-round interdisciplinary historical treatise); religion and ecology (Lynn White’s classic article, which I’m surprised no one seemed to mention, Vine Deloria’s God Is Red, Catherine Albanese’s Nature Religion in America); green political theory (Robyn Eckersley’s Environmentalism and Political Theory); eco-sociology (Ulrich Beck’s The Risk Society); and so on.

And then there’s the inevitable question of whether we are selecting for influence or for continued relevance — for instance, whether Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” should still be read without, at the very least, supplementing it with the many counter-arguments that have made his original argument seem so tenuous (see, e.g., Ostrom et al’s Revisiting the Commons); ditto with Lynn White, Ehrlich’s early work, and so on.

With all those caveats in mind, then, I would like to propose my own list of 33⅓ Environmental Studies Classics (no relation to the wonderful Bloomsbury book series).

It’s not so much a recognized canon as a canon and counter-canon combined, including some works I think deserve much wider recognition. It’s biased towards the interdisciplinary, historical, and political-ecological — “green theory” that reflects the growth of green politics more than academic environmental studies, and that prefers synthetic and holistic thinking about nature-society relations over the inspirational (eco-literature, ecopoetry, and the like). Not that the literary and inspirational cannot also be synthetic and holistic, or that it shouldn’t count as “environmental studies” — just that that would be a separate list, for another day, and that it would be too difficult to come up with in any case, once we get to sifting through all the essays, novels, and poems in the world that effectively convey the interdependence of humans and the larger-than-human world.

In other words, once we agree that “environmental studies” is not equivalent to “U.S. environmental studies” (and that it’s broader than “the environmental humanities”), we open ourselves up to a vast world of writing and culture. Still, the world we share faces some common dilemmas that have to do with learning to recognize and work with the tight intertwinings of human and nonhuman worlds, and the following readings, while all recognizable “hits” within one field or another, contribute to working those dilemmas out. All have either been influential in at least some versions of the field of environmental studies or (by my account) they should be influential.

Here goes…

A Canon: 33⅓ Environmental Studies Greats (listed in roughly chronological order):

1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859) — Without Darwin (or someone else, like Wallace, to play his role in an alternate universe), there’d be nothing.
2. George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864) — I live in Marsh’s Vermont (a state radically changed — much more forested and green — since his day), so I can’t really not mention it. But it holds its own.
3. Vladimir Vernadsky, Biosfera (The Biosphere, first published in Russian in 1926) — Building on Darwin and Marsh, Vernadsky first articulates the global, and even cosmic, scope of the ecological vision.
4. Mohandas Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (first published 1925-28, India) — Environmental activism would not be what it is without Gandhi’s ideas and examples, and this first autobiography (covering the years up to 1921) conveys where that comes from better than any other book.
5. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944) — It’s difficult to understand the capitalist transformation of relations between humans and land without reading Polanyi.
6. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949) — Remains a classic, particularly for its articulation of a Leopold’s famous “Land Ethic.”
7. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962) — If any book can be single-handedly credited with launching the modern environmental movement, it’s this. (Best read with an analysis of Carson’s method, such as Lorraine Code’s Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location.)
8. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) — Classic historical overview of the American conservation and wilderness preservation movements.
9. Donella Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth (1972) — I include it only for its historical significance in influencing the field of environmental studies. Read it (if you will) alongside the 30-year and 40-year updates. Modeling remains all the rage, so it’s important to have a sense of its usefulness alongside its pitfalls.
10. Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post Industrial Society (1972) — A powerful articulation of the Romantic counter-tradition to industrial modernity. Captures what was best about the counterculture, which was so influential on the environmentalism of the 1970s.
11. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (1979) — It’s difficult to choose between Bateson’s many writings. This is his last book published while he was alive and contains a succinct overview of his “epistemology” for overcoming human-nature (and mind-matter) dualism.
12. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (1989, based on his 1976 Norwegian original) — A distillation of the Naess’s philosophical writings on “deep ecology,” marked by their sophistication and ambiguity (in comparison with some of what came out of that philosophical school later).
13. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (1982) — The most satisfying and capacious work by the founder of the “social ecology” school of radical environmental thought and practice.
14. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (orig. 1977, revised 1994) — Probably still the best single introduction to, as he calls it, the history of ecological ideas.
15. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (1984) — Provided a crucial injection of Marxian political economy into environmental thinking, and did it provocatively and smartly.
16. Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment (1985) — This Canadian ecophilosopher’s book marks the first deep infusion of Continental thinking (especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but also Jakob von Uexkull, Adolf Portmann, and others) into North American eco-theory.
17. Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution (1985, rev. 2000) – For anyone with leanings towards oversimplified evolutionism, especially of the sociobiological “selfish gene” school, Oyama provides the most sophisticated antidote. A must read for the eco-biopolitics of the 21st century.
18. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986) — Good for giving a sense of biocultural change writ large, by an eminent historian. Start here and avoid some of the pitfalls that other popularizers, such as Jared Diamond and E. O. Wilson, have fallen into.
19. World Commission on Environment and Development (Gro Harlem Brundtland, chair), Our Common Future (1987) — As with The Limits to Growth (#9 above), this is included for its historical significance in shaping international conversations around environment, development, and the future of humanity.
20. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989) — Haraway’s most thorough historical study, it chisels away at our inherited ideas of the human and the natural by showing how we can never get ourselves (society, economy, politics) out of the picture. What better place to do that than the hinge at which we try to separate ourselves from the rest of our relatives: primatology?
21. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality (1990) — One of the launching points of the environmental justice movement, by an African-American sociologist whose research provided key insights to galvanize that movement.
22. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991, Eng. 1993) — While its style of argumentation errs on the dramatic and impishly provocateurial, here’s where Latour makes the clearest case for a thoroughly transdisciplinary dismantling of nature-culture dualism. Still the best introduction to Latour’s thinking.
23. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) — Perhaps the most significant theoretical work from the ecofeminist branch of environmental philosophy.
24. Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (1993) — A good introduction to Shiva’s important Southern voice on ecology, biology, and science.
25. The Ecologist, Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (1994) — Still a cogent injection of political smartness into discussions of environment, sustainability, and globalization; and a good summary of one of the responses to Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” argument.
26. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1995) – A little book and a quick read, but immensely rewarding, from a leading environmental historian who thoroughly incorporates the thick historical entwining of nature and culture that so many others only pay lip service to.
27. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism (1995) — Adds significantly to the global picture built up by Crosby (#18 above) and others.
28. William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1996) — First big splash of the interdisciplinary field of “environmental humanities,” and an important salvo in the “nature wars” (the eco- wing of the “science wars”).
29. Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997) — Another essential contribution from Southern voices (see #24 above).
30. Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997) — A cutting-edge, Deleuzian complex-systems analysis of the last thousand years of geological, biological, economic, and cultural change, this book deserves wider readership than it’s gotten.
31. Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (2005) — Its central argument about the need for “experience in nature,” and it’s journalistic but synoptic style of making its case (with reference to scientific research), have been so influential among average folks that it’s difficult to argue against the inclusion of this book.
32. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) — Its problems are many and legion (among anthropologists, geographers, and others who study these things), but the case Diamond makes for the unnamed field of “collapsology,” or how societies collapse (ecologically) and how they could keep themselves from collapsing, is an essential argument for everything good that goes under the name of “sustainability” these days. (There is, of course, more than just the good, but let’s keep our eyes on the prize.)
33. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014) — For my earlier list, I specified that “classic” status required at least a decade’s digestion. This time around, I’m willing to grant “instant classic” status to at least this one book. It packs so much in, and generates enough controversy, to keep the topic alive for some time to come. (Another candidate for “instant classic” might be Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, but let’s leave exceptions exceptional.)

There you go.

Grad students, read those 33 books and you will be ready to write your comps. Anyone, read them and you will be qualified to call yourself environmentally prepared (in theory, not necessarily in practice) for the 21st century.

(I’m sure I’m forgetting important books, for which I apologize. The list can, of course, grow indefinitely and your book, dear reader, most certainly deserves to be on some version of it!)

But if you’re like most people and don’t have time to read 33 books, but might have time for one — if it was short and sweet (making it the missing “⅓”) — the one I’d recommend is Ramachandra Guha’s Environmentalism: A Global History (Longman, 2000). It could use an update, but if you’ll only read one book of all of these, then you could use an update, too… 🙂